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Observation of early childhood

Observation
of the Early Childhood

An
observation was held in the children"s wing of Tarrant County Junior
College. A variety of children between the ages of two to six were observed in
activities ranging from physical and motor to social and cognitive
development. Specifically I mean that whether it was leadership skills or lack
of, running, climbing and jumping, drawing and writing, or anything that could
fall between, it has been seen, done and accounted for in the following
observation.

First let's
start with the physical and motor development. Please say hello to Karligh and
Bethany, my first volunteers of the observation. Both girls are in the
four-year olds. The first activities under physical and motor development that
I'm going to observe them performing are the large muscle/gross-motor skills.
The large muscle/gross-motor skills include: climbing across the monkey bars,
riding bigwheels (or tricycles), and running through a built-in obstacle
course on the playground.

Starting
with the monkey bars, it's clearly obvious that Karligh is physically stronger
upperbody-wise than Bethany. With surprising ease, Karligh crossed the monkey
bars using nothing but her arms to perform this task. Bethany on the otherhand
was shaky and uncertain from the start. After hanging from the first bar, she
quickly swung her feet over to the side for leg support. She was able to cross
but only with a great deal of assistance from me.

Karligh
also showed mastery in riding the big wheel. Her speed and turning ability
seemed to surpass anyone else on the playground. Bethany chose to ride only
after a piece of candy bribery. Her tricycle skills were somewhat sluggish but
more or less average. However, once again Bethany was victorious.

The last
large muscle activity was completing the obstacle course. The obstacle course
involved running up a slide, crawling through a tunnel, crossing a shaky bridge
and then walking along a balance beam. Karligh ran up the slide with a
considerable amount of effort. She quickly crawled through the tunnel and
crossed the shaky bridge with little effort. She crossed the balance beam more
quickly than I'd seen any child do that whole day. Bethany climbed up the
slide in a time that was a bit quicker than Karligh's. The crawling through
the tunnel was done quickly and she was first stalled on the shaky bridge. She
managed to cross the bridge in a modest time but she hit some trouble at the
balance beam. After slowly completing about ten percent of the travel across
the beam, she turned her feet sideways for the remainder of the crossing, which
took about two minutes.

The second
area in the physical and motor development involves the use of small muscle or
fine motor skills. For the observation, these skills include writing, and
playing the drums (the only two fine motor skills I saw both children
perform). These children are four years old so when I say writing I of course
am not talking about paragraphs or even sentences. More simply, my writing
section only involved writing their names. Karligh was able to produce her
name on paper in a legibility that was impressive for someone four years of
age. Bethany too was able to write her name but just not quite as nice as
Bethany.

After
observing the two children playing the drums, I think it's unlikely for either
girl to win a scholarship for college as a percussionist. Bethany's playing
was sporadic and entirely inconsistent but hey, she's only four. Karligh's
drumming skills were a bit more impressive since she managed to lay down and
keep a beat for a short amount of time.

In judging
overall competence in gross and fine-motor skills, it's obvious Karligh was
better at both, but for most children competence seemed to lean more on one
than the other. The "strong kids" on the playground who were the
fastest tricycle riders, the highest jumping and so on, seemed to shy away from
more of the finer fine motor skills. As for the kids that seemed significantly
dominate in fine-motor skills, they were more likely to be seen playing in the
sand box or just taking it easy as opposed to climbing, jumping, etc. This
didn't always hold as true. As mentioned before, there were exceptions such as
Karligh.

Now we're
on to the second half of the observation, which involves social and cognitive
development. This section includes sociodramatic play, drawing pictures,
counting and identifying leadership skills or the lack of. The first half of
this section takes place in the kindergarten's room where all of the kids are
five or six years of age.

The
sociodramatic play I saw involved two kids (Matt and Tyler), three wooden
box-like objects and a board that was close to the size of a board seen on a
seesaw. The three wooden boxes are spaced about eight inches apart, side by
side, with the board lying across all three boxes. The board hangs past the
boxes approximately three feet. So what do you have???? That's right, a
spaceship. No specific movies or TV shows are mentioned in this play. We
simply have Matt as the pilot and Tyler as the copilot as the two fly over the
galaxy fighting other spaceships. Now the children are landing the spaceship at
an airport where Matt says he's going to work on it. The children hop off the
ship and shift the board and climb back on the ship to "go fight some
other guys." In the middle of a battle Miss Williams, the teacher,
announces that it's cleanup time and she pops the clean up song in the tape
player. Without hesitation and in fact enthusiastically, Matt and Tyler hop of
their spaceship, as it once again becomes three wooden boxes and a long board,
and proceed to put the objects away as they sing the "clean up song."

The second
part of the social and cognitive development section is where I observed a
child drawing a picture. William is the five year old artist I observed.
William is making a noble effort trying to draw an airplane. Probably the most
interesting part of William's drawing is the human characteristics he gives to
the airplane. The airplane is standing upright with its tail, which looks much
like a person's legs planted firmly on the ground. The wings go straight out,
side to side and carry the resemblance of a person's arms. The head of the
plane has an overall accurate shape to that of a real airplane. On the head of
the plane, William has drawn in two eyes and a smiling mouth. The only thing
left out(reasonably speaking that is when taking into consideration that a five
year old child is drawing this) is a fully developed tail. William was
unwilling to give up his picture for my project.

The
counting section was short and sweet. Once again the observation is back in
the four year olds age group. Karligh, Madison, Lincoln and Zann were the four
participants in the counting contest. The rules are simple, count till you
can't count no more. Our first dropout of the contest was the physical and
motor development queen, that's right, Karligh. Karligh couldn't go past
twelve. Madison hung on until twentythree and Zann lasted until that evertricky
thirtynine. Zann was our champion who kept going and going and going until I
stopped since I felt 156 was sufficient.

The
leadership skills I noticed during various free play times tended to come from
the four year olds and the kindergarteners. The younger age groups, especially
the two year olds, tended to stick to themselves. The solitary playtime seemed
to happen less and less as I observed the older age groups. Matt, the
spaceship pilot, seemed to be an all around leader no matter what the scenario
was. On the playground, Matt led a squadron of about seven kids up and down
the slides, across the monkey bars and whereever else he chose to go. He would
occasionally stop running around and he would proceed to give orders to each of
his group. Most of the time, the children would accept and follow the orders
without hesitation.

Robby is
the best example I could find for children that seem to be lacking in
leadership skills. At the end of story time the teacher radomly picks a child
and gives that the child the oppurtunity to decide whether boys go to the
bathroom and girls go to the sink or vice versa. On this occassion, the
teacher picked Robby. Robby showed reluctance or perhaps confusion when asked
to lead the children. He finally did but only after a good amount of
hesitation. On the playground Robby tends to stick with himself. At one
point, he rode the tricycle around in a sluggish fashion. For the most part,
Robby stayed in the gravel pit and played with buckets of gravel ignoring the
kids that run around and over him.

Hopefully
this observation can give some insight of the preschool age group. Although
this was only a sample, perhaps some conclusions can be drawn on the
development and behavior of these children.

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